No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  Even now, weeks after the Games have ended, the Chinese state media continue with a steady mantra of “number one in gold,” intruding the message into the lives of Chinese everywhere, including in Hong Kong and Macao. CCTV and local sports channels are still counting and re-counting the gold medals, reviewing how each was won, praising once more each Chinese champion, and harping on the idea that China has risen to become a gold medal colossus. Sina.com, the huge state-sponsored Internet portal, has set up a site where, under the heading “Boundless Glory: The Rise of a Great Nation,” viewers “can take one more look at how each of China’s gold medals was won.” NetEase, another major portal, offers a similar opportunity under the heading “A Perfect End to the Beijing Games: China’s Haul of 51 Gold Medals Makes History.”

  After the Games were over, a delegation of gold-medal winners, led by Party sports official Liu Peng, descended upon Hong Kong and Macao to wow the locals with the mainland’s gold-medal luster. At a press conference in Hong Kong, Liu Peng and his fellow officials could hardly have been more overbearing. Their tone and demeanor seemed to be telling the people of Hong Kong: “These gold medalists are heroes of the people. No disrespect will be tolerated!” Whenever a politically sensitive question was directed to any of the athletes, they cut the athlete off and answered themselves, and each answer was obviously scripted.

  The love of gold medals among Party officials and the patriotic set has reached a point that we can call pathological. They are like some of our country’s new millionaires, who adore counting the gold in their pockets, and to whom the clink of coins is the loveliest music in the world and their glitter the most dazzling of the world’s light.

  The Beijing Olympics were always a top priority for the Hu-Wen regime in its program to channel popular nationalism into support of its dictatorship. In preparing for the Olympics, Chinese officials pitched in at all levels, the whole nation was mobilized, enormous sums of money were spent, a wild surge of nationalism resulted—and all of this happened on scales that were unprecedented in the hundred-year history of the modern Olympics. Moreover, in China, winning or losing international sports contests had become so thoroughly politicized and so steeped in nationalism that the gold medals of the Beijing Olympics had taken on the added burden of the Great Country dream—the playing out of the “overtaking-the-West” complex that Mao Zedong had planted in the popular Chinese mind fifty years ago when he promised that China’s “Great Leap Forward” would see it “overtake” the developed world in fifteen years.

  I do not know whether other countries love gold medals as much as China does, but I do know that there is no way any other country could marshal such vast resources in pursuit of a “Gold Medal Great Leap Forward.” Before the Olympics, Party boss Hu Jintao issued a proclamation. “The Beijing Olympics,” he said, “should demonstrate the superiority of the socialist system by showing how it concentrates strength in order to manage great undertakings.” Hu’s enthusiasm echoed Mao and the Great Leap Forward about “surpassing” Britain and America. Mao had targeted iron and steel production, and Chinese at the time were led to be fanatical about producing iron and steel, even in their own backyards. Then, the slogan was “The Whole Nation Is One Big Steel Mill.” Now, it was “The Whole Nation Does the Olympics.” The goal was different; the madness was similar.

  China’s rulers, after making gold-medalism the core of their Olympic strategy, and after fueling the Olympic effort with the kind of massive investment that only the authoritarian government of a large country could make, did indeed achieve steady increases in the number of gold medals at successive Olympic Games. In Atlanta in 1996, China took fourth place; in Sydney in 2000, third place; in Athens in 2004, second place: with each Olympics, it was one step up. After the Athens Games, to reach first place in the gold-medal count became the goal for the Beijing Games. And in the end the regime got its wish: it supplanted America as Mr. Big at the gold-medal table. The first-place finish gave China bragging rights before the world.

  When Liu Xiang won the 110-meter hurdles at the Athens Games in 2004, his time was 12.91 seconds, a new Olympic record and an equal of the world record. Liu was the first Asian athlete ever to win such an honor. When the race concluded, the CCTV announcer went crazy on the live broadcast, positively howling, and Liu Xiang himself descended into histrionics when he accepted the medal. In a later interview he said, “No worries, Asia; no worries, China: you’ve got me on your side!” Overnight he became “a hero of the people,” and Chinese fans grew giddy as they celebrated that “a New China has emerged in competition.” Liu Xiang became the country’s new “Soaring Man” (punning on his given name xiang ‘soar’), and simultaneously a symbol for all of Chinese athletics as well as the single Chinese athlete upon whom the greatest of hopes were pinned.

  In the run-up to the Beijing Games, the halo of nationalism hovering over Liu Xiang shined all across China. His image was on posters everywhere—in both city and countryside, along broad avenues and tucked into narrow alleys. Even more over-the-top, this: the number on his track suit, No. 1356, symbolized the 1.3 billion people of China and their 56 ethnic nationalities. All eyes were anticipating his performance in the dazzling new stadium called the Bird’s Nest, and the gold for the 110-meter hurdles became the number-one gold medal in the popular mind. For some fans, it was only Liu Xiang’s hurdles that drew them to the Bird’s Nest.

  Then, when Liu had to withdraw from the event because of an injury, in the process quashing hopes for the Chinese track team’s sprint to the gold, “the people’s hero” instantly lost his luster, inflicted keen disappointment upon the “patriotic” set, and brought forth a tidal wave of gossip among the public.

  In Olympic history there have been many instances of great athletes needing to withdraw from competition because of injury. Never, though, has there been a public howl the size of what we heard after Liu Xiang’s withdrawal. China was already well ahead of the U.S. in the race to be Mr. Big in gold medals, so that was not the point. The outcry over Liu Xiang’s withdrawal exposed something deeper; it showed the defensive mentality, the aberrant vanity, of an insecure country that “cannot afford to lose.” With so many people—officials and ordinary citizens alike—so in a tizzy over gold medals, the guardians of “patriotism” could be as oppressive toward Liu Xiang as they liked; they could invoke the sacred cows of “national honor” and “the interests of the state” to force him to bow his head. Amid all the hue and cry the superhero “soaring man” finally crumbled. He had to come out before the whole nation and apologize.

  I think that only a centralized sports machine like China’s could generate such a fixation on gold medals, and only that fixation could have necessitated the absurd spectacle of an athlete apologizing to his fellow citizens for an injury. The real absurdity, though, is that—given what the Chinese system is—the demands for an apology actually did make a kind of sense. Liu Xiang’s achievements were the result of training for which the Party-state had paid; his crown as a “hero of the people” was also something that the Party-state, and the “patriotic masses,” had given to him. Therefore his success or failure was much more than his personal gain or loss; it involved the interests of the State and the honor of the nation. The number 1356 on his back meant that his fate was the fate of 1.3 billion people: a win from him was glory for the Party-state and the people; a loss was their collective shame. Of course he had to apologize if he didn’t deliver the goods.

  The gold-medalism of China’s centralized sports machine arose after the Los Angeles Games of 1984, when China won its first gold medal, and since then has cost Chinese taxpayers dearly. Now, after coming in first in gold medals in Beijing, the machine will feel the added burden of pressure from high expectations. As soon as the Beijing Games were over, the Chinese media descended into endless rounds of spectacular boasting, and they made much of praise that appeared in foreign media. When Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said that the Ga
mes were “truly exceptional,” China’s state media trumpeted the phrase and, in their translation, promoted it to “beyond compare.” The excitement that gripped the whole country at being number one in gold seemed to forecast a brilliant prospect of China’s overtaking America in every other respect and becoming the number one nation in the world. It is this implied mission of the centralized sports machine that causes it to fall into the gold-medal syndrome and to create so much anxiety.

  The gold-medal syndrome generates at least the following four crises:

  1. Sports in China have come to be divided into two broad categories, the Olympic elite and everybody else, and the two groups are grossly unequal in their access to resources. The Olympics machine is the biggest among the projects that the Party-state uses to manufacture face for itself. No amount of either money or manpower is too great to spend on it. In the seven years before the Beijing Olympics, elite athletes got nothing but the best in support and equipment, while ordinary people often got nothing at all. The gold-medal athletes in the Olympics machine lived in a lonely world all their own, high in the clouds, lavishly supplied with both money and glory, while ordinary athletes, by the same two measures, were poverty-stricken. Just as China’s lopsided economic reforms have given rise to a singular worship of GDP and have divided China between a heaven where the power elite can get rich overnight and a hell where the powerless constantly lose out, the gold-medal obsession of the centralized sports machine similarly—no, inevitably—creates a heaven for elite athletes and a hell for ordinary athletes.

  China’s number one place in gold medals depended on huge investments. Leaving aside the incalculable costs in money and manpower of the worldwide “torch relay,” and without counting the costs for all the Olympic security, the official on-paper outlays for the Olympics reached 43 billion U.S. dollars. This is more than four times the $9.7 billion that China spent in 2007 on public health and medical care, and nearly three times the $15.7 billion spent on education. (Huang Wei, advisor to the Beijing Olympic committee, at one point disclosed an even higher figure: 520 billion yuan, or more than $70 billion U.S.) Such extravagance for “gold-medal sports” is not only unprecedented in developing countries; it would be lavish even in developed nations. The scale of the Chinese Party-state’s outlays probably exceeds anything in Olympic history and may never be matched again. It will be impossible for London, four years from now, to invest more money or to mobilize more manpower than Beijing did. To sponsor events in which money is no object is something that lies within the reach only of dictatorships that can disregard the interests of their own people. They can simply mandate that taxpayers foot the bill.

  In sharp contrast to China’s massive spending, the IOC, right after the Beijing Games, announced a plan to “trim costs.” IOC president Rogge, while praising Beijing’s spectacular show, saw a danger that the Beijing example might put pressure on future host countries and frankly stated that the Olympics need to undergo some “changes.” “Olympic gigantism” was imposing heavy burdens on host countries. The Games should be “trimmed down” and not staged on this kind of scale again.

  2. Gold-medal obsession obliges China’s athletes to pay enormous prices in personal dignity and in normal human relations. For the sake of Olympic gold, Chinese athletes, right from childhood, enter government-run sports schools where they live in special dormitories, are completely cut off from the outside world, and submit to training that is almost military in nature. They not only lose their freedom but must make sacrifices in love and affection as well. In the words of a Party sports official, “to win Olympic glory for the Motherland is a sacred mission entrusted to us by Party Central.” This “sacred mission” can be a cruel thing. It can obstruct even the love between a mother and daughter. Xian Dongmei, winner of the gold in judo, was the only mother on China’s Olympic team. In order to train for the Games, she had to leave her 18-month-old daughter and didn’t see her for a whole year. Cao Lei, who won the gold in weightlifting, was sealed off even from the news of his mother’s death, and did not attend her funeral.

  Athletes hand over their entire personal lives in full-bore preparation for the Games. Chen Yibing, the gymnast who won the gold in the flying rings, was candid in an interview: “You’ve got no control over your own life. The coach is always right there with you. Someone is always watching you, even the physicians and the cooks in the cafeteria. You’ve got no choice: you have to submit to the training. You can’t let others down.”

  The coercion in the centralized sports machine exacts another price from China’s athletes: their health. Prospective Olympic divers are selected for training as young as 5 or 6, even though health professionals know that to start diving at this age, before the eyes have fully developed, can do permanent harm. The force of impact when a diver enters the water is enough to damage a child’s retina. Gold medalist Guo Jingjing, who had been recruited for the diving team at age 6, has sustained serious eye damage. His vision is now so bad that he has trouble making out the diving board, and he could go blind at any time. Li Fenglian, the doctor for China’s Olympic diving team, told a journalist that a research report she published last year showed that 26 of the 184 members of the team had suffered damage to their retinas.

  3. Gold-medal obsession increases both the power and the cynicism of “all-pervasive politics” under the rule of China’s Party-state. Once the Olympics were declared the highest national interest, they naturally also became the highest political mission, and that meant that they trumped everything else. From then on, everything had to be either “for the Olympics” or “out of the way of the Olympics.” Party, government, military, civilians, business, the academy—everybody—fell in line to pursue the overriding political goal. No expense was spared—in money, materials, or manpower—to build first-class stadia and service facilities. Staff, security personnel, and volunteers working on the Games not only broke an Olympic record in their numbers; they had to be politically reliable, too. They all went through a multistage screening process and were closely observed during training. Their task was to envelop foreign reporters and tourists in comfort and amiability, offering them VIP treatment and charming smiles, reducing friction to a minimum.

  In the name of the exalted interests of state, “omnicompetent politics” could, moreover, use absolutely any means it chose—from brazen fakery like the dubbed singing and fake footprints at the opening ceremony* to the falsified ages of some of the athletes to the inauthentic smiles of the trained volunteers. Meanwhile a heavy hand obliterated every trace of dissent. The media had guidelines of “zero criticism” when speaking for itself and “only praise” in selecting material from the foreign media. Foreign protesters were expelled from China, and the three parks that were reserved for domestic protesters produced, as expected, “zero criticism.”

  Only its unlimited power could allow the Party-state to flaunt a report card for such smooth logistics and such first-rate stadia and facilities. And only a government of this kind could throw a ring of steel around Beijing to assure security. Silently missing from the report card was the Party-state’s cynical abandonment of its promises about human rights. The dream-come-true of winning the gold-medal derby must be weighed against a citizens’ nightmare of utterly dismal human rights.

  4. The worst consequence of the gold-medal obsession has been that it has strengthened the forces blocking reform. The Olympics “success” has confirmed the Communist regime’s confidence in its style of authoritarian control and has deepened the delusion of many citizens that China, thanks to the efficiency of the Party’s dictatorship, is on the verge of becoming the number one country in the world. Zhang Yimou, the famous film director who agreed to design Beijing’s opening ceremony, said in an interview that “the ceremony combined opulent extravagance with precise regularity of movement and a grand narrative, and this required tremendous resources—human, material, and financial. In today’s world, the only countries that could pull this off are China and North
Korea.”

  In other words, the Olympics have served to delay the reform of a rotten system, and indeed have helped it to gain strength that might keep it going longer than it otherwise would. This is, in any case, how the Party-state itself sees the matter. As soon as the final tallies in the gold-medal derby were clear, Party sports officials were quick to credit China’s success to the centralized sports machine. Wei Jizhong, senior advisor to the Beijing Olympic Committee, said at a press conference that forty-five gold medals demonstrated the efficacy of the “whole nation system.” He cited the fate of sports programs in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of central authoritarian rule there as proof that China had been wise to stick to its ways.

  After the Games, People’s Daily published an interview with Liu Peng, director of the State General Administration of Sports, under the headline “Sports Must Persist with the Whole Nation System.” Liu was candid in saying that China needs a system of centralized control in sports not only because the country is so large but for political reasons. He said:

  Sports themselves are not political, but they have important political functions. The close connection between sports and national identity takes different forms in different countries at various stages of development, and in China it has special significance. The phrase “a weak country has no sports” has particularly painful associations for Chinese people [owing to China’s nineteenth-century image as “The sick man of Asia”—Trans.]. For sports to keep pace with the general progress of a nation is not only right and proper in itself but serves as an inspiration to the people; as inspiration it extends beyond the domain of sports to heighten national confidence, pride, and cohesion in a broader sense … [this is why] we shall continue to rely on the approach of centralized command. It is one of our fine traditions, it sums up our efficient model, and it works to bring our people together and to get them moving. Our position on the “whole nation system” is clear: we will retain it and we will continue to perfect it.